Wednesday, 28 August 2013

The picture is now clear that, Ubuntu has succeeded in winning millions of hearts all around the globe as it has been being used in smartphones, tablets and also in televisions. Ubuntu community, in fact, has been making strong efforts aiming to bring Ubuntu as the best product in the FOSS world.

There was a time when Ubuntu was used to be discouraged pointing at its “Non-user friendly nature”. Its “lack of usability” was the main subject of discussion in various forums and blogs. However, we have seen Ubuntu developing and maturing to a great extent managing to come out as one of the most user-friendly distributions in the FOSS community.

Not only the Ubuntu, there are several other Linux flavors like Fedora and openSUSE that are much user-friendly. Following are some of the points which would explain why you should switch to or try Linux Mint at least once:

1. Multiple Choices

Linux Mint comes with two desktop choices: Cinnamon and Mate, which makes sure that its users can get multiple choices to select their favorite desktop environment to work upon. Linux Ubuntu has no choice and it insists every user to use a completely modern desktop, whereas Mint will provide you the choice of selection between a modern desktop and a more conventional desktop.

2. The Well-known Desktop

Linux Mint brings you a generalized desktop interface which hopes to offer a comfortable transition to Linux Mint from other operating systems. It has user interface which is easy to use, quick and graceful, and most importantly, it will be very less probable that you would experience some difficulties while working on Mint desktop.

3. A Well-Developed Ubuntu

Linux Mint is derived from Ubuntu and it provides all the Ubuntu decency in an elegant, exciting and well-designed packages. Many application developers have been motivated by Ubuntu’s fame as well. In case, when you wish to download some applications like Dropbox or Steam for your Ubuntu machine, it is very handy to do so with no compatibility issues.

4. Pleasant and Fascinating Looks

We have seen many of Mint users admiring the artwork provided in Mint’s workspace. Mint brings a pleasant bunch of wallpapers and attractive themes that makes your desktop look wonderful. Mint desktop is not too complex or exaggerated, still it boasts of its simple and amazing design work.

5. Customizability

When it comes to customizability, Linux Mint is found to be more customizable compared to Ubuntu. You can not only download your favorite themes, you can design your own ones. Mint allows its users to modify the sizes and the positions of the panels.

6. GNOME 3 Support

Although Mint sticks to the conventional models of the desktop environments, it still supports plenty of modern features. Mint desktop uses GNOME 3 and that keeps it well above par with some other recent desktops.

7. Mobile Oriented? - No

Ubuntu and GNOME3 concentrate very much on desktop-mobile convergence aspect. Although both of them are elegantly designed, Ubuntu and GNOME 3 have managed to ward off many users who say that a desktop should look like a desktop and nothing else.

8. Pre-installed Recent Applications

Linux Mint comes with all the latest applications in the form of pre-installed packages. You will find Mozilla Firefox, VLC media player along with the recent version of kernel in its release. Not only this, you will also observe that Mint can run MP3s & the other formats making it a complete desktop operating system.

6 comments:

Linux Mint is a great distribution and, quite frankly, I prefer a community-based distribution. However it's not really accurate to say that Ubuntu has few choices. Ubuntu GNOME (GNOME3), Lubuntu (LXDE), Xubuntu (XFCE), and Kubuntu (KDE) are official derivatives. LXDE is my favorite desktop environment and it's not supported by Mint anymore...

There are plenty of GUI choices in Ubuntu. If you know how to install things you can easily install other guis. And I've used Mint, I wasn't terribly impressed last time and the difference between it and Ubuntu was purely aesthetic and there was so little difference it may as well have been the same distro. But, you make some interesting points and I will take another look. If you were to take advice from me about your article. The first thing should be that you can EASILY change desktop environments. Ubuntu doesn't FORCE you to use Unity, you just have to know how to use Aptitude or command line to install anything else. (Which I do immediately cause I HATE Unity.)